The USA-Advisor: A Case Study in Answer Set Planning

In this work we show how control knowledge was used to improve planning in the USA-Advisor decision support system for the Space Shuttle. The USA-Advisor is a medium size, real-world planning application for use by NASA flight controllers and contains over a dozen domain dependent and domain independent heuristics. Experimental results are presented here, illustrating how this control knowledge helps improve both the quality of plans as well as overall system performance.